Susan Moskwa from Google announced a move of Google Webmaster Help forum to their new Product Platform.

Google Products Platform is promising better user experience and easier discussion. Marking the best answer (which Google considers one of the top priority features) will be available on the new platform.…

According to OECD’s better life index Australia is the #1 place to live if all factors were treated with equal importance. The criteria includes: housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance.

Change one of more parameters though and the order shifts in favor of another country.…

Ever wondered if Google can tell if content is funny or not? Sanketh Shetty writes about YouTube’s attempt to gauge comedy levels of video content by observing its content and comments. In summary, it’s a combination of crowd-sourced algorithm feeding (75,000 users and 700,000 votes), material recognition and comment analysis.…

An open access initiative is celebrating ten years of its activities and existence. The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.…

Related People and Pages is one of the newest tools to hit Google. Google recently released a set of search options that Google+ users can take advantage of, and many SEO experts are currently experimenting with these features to best enhance their search engine exposure.…

Here’s one thing Google could improve user experience: Demote results for out of stock product pages and promote the ones that are available – even if they don’t have high rankings to start with. How’s that?

I am a fan of Polo Blue and tend to buy the same deodorant over and over again.…

It’s been a while since open access and open source events have been as interesting as they are now. While the things are heating up around Elsevier publisher, including a petition being signed by academics to refuse to publish or do any editorial work for any Elsevier journal, on the other side there have been open source changes announced at the FOSDEM conference in Belgium.…

This is a quick study on how asterisk symbol affects Google search queries, illustrated on a search for insurance in Google Australia.

Quick Summary:

insurance: brings results with word insurance highlighted in title and description*insurance: word insurance is highlighted with the nearest relevant phrase before itinsurance*: word insurance is highlighted with the nearest relevant phrase after it *insurance*: word insurance is highlighted with the nearest relevant phrases before and after it

Search Variations:

Where Google decided to bold a relevant related term instead of the main key term we searched for:

Insure

Search Anomalies:

Terms that were bold in results that are either not relevant or useful to users: